A Reflection on Moravia's Agostino
While reading Agostino I was disturbed by the relationship between thirteen-year-old Agostino and his mother. It quickly became clear that Agostino had a less than innocent attraction towards her. I think Moravia was direct with regard to Freud’s Oedipus Complex as Agostino was entering a reality where he realizes that he unconsciously desires a sexual union with his mother and spends the remainder of the book trying to repress it. When his mother starts to spend time with her new love interest Renzo, Agostino feels neglected and jealous. The summer was the start of his sensual awakening, not only did he feel pride for being associated with his mother’s beauty, but with the association of his new friends, he learnt what his desires meant and why he didn’t like his mom spending time with Renzo.
Agostino’s shame later turns to anger towards his mother for example on page 69 “unable to bear his mother’s unawareness or his own attentions, he wanted to shout, “Cover yourself, stop showing yourself to me, I’m not who I used to be.” He uses his new friends as a distraction from his situation with his mother, but the more time he spends with them the more he comes to realize how naive and childish he is. They expose him to rough behaviours, a perspective on the low-income class, and gave him a strong male presence that he had been lacking since the death of his father. They viewed him as weak and sheltered, so he had to work on being the person he thought they wanted him to be. His newfound sexuality paired with his new friends gives him an overwhelming escalation into manhood. The change that happened within him this summer had already been a source of suffering for him and getting kicked out of the house of prostitutes gave him the idea that he was still young and how he was not yet a man “and many unhappy days would pass before he became one.”
Overall I thought the story was well written and an easy read. It had a number of well presented themes that I enjoyed, including class, sexuality, and coming of age. I thought the author’s psychoanalytic approach illustrated Agostino’s agony of his position and attraction to his mother. My question for the class is how do you think Agostino’s relationship/attraction to his mother will affect his future relationships?
Hi Megan! I'll go right into answering your question. I think that Agostino's strange attraction to his mom will very much affect his future relationships. I believe that he will either find a partner who physically resembles his mom or whose mannerisms and personality reminds him of his mother. Because she was the first woman whom Agostino saw as a woman and not just a person, it set the bar and the expectation for what a "woman" is like in his eyes.
ReplyDeleteHi Megan!
ReplyDeleteGreat post about this weeks reading! To answer your question, I agree with Lisa in that it will most likely lead him to compare his future partners to his own mother and he will try to find someone who is similar to her. I also think that he might always end up resenting whoever develops a relationship with his mother, and he will most likely always find himself having a strained relationship with his mother's partners.
Hi Megan,
ReplyDeleteI enjoyed reading your post! I also created connections to Freud’s Oedipus Complex with how he viewed his mother. His relationship with his mother will most likely cause problems and interfere with his future relationships since he has to face coming of age by himself and is not trying to vocalize his pressures to his mother.
Hi Megan! Your post is incredibly interesting, and I find your comments on the text to be interesting too. Based on your question, I believe that Agostino's relationship will most definitely affect his future relationships. It could be that he would feel a sense of unsatisfaction due to this. Rather, it is also possible that he would seek approval from his mother more than anyone else would. Though, it is shown in the text that if there is little influence, or lack of presence of his mother, he tends to grow and mature.
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